Public Accounts Committee hearing on ‘Skills Fund’ postponed
A meeting of the Dáil Public Accounts Committee (PAC) on 1st March to discuss issues surrounding the Skills Training Programme Fund (known as the ‘Skills Fund’) administered by the Health Service Executive (HSE) and at which SIPTU was due to attend, has been postponed.
The PAC has decided to postpone the hearing following the decision by the Comptroller and Auditor General (C&AG), John Buckley, to continue his audit into the ‘Skills Fund’ including details of the ‘SIPTU Health and Local Authority Levy Fund’ (known as the ‘Levy Fund’ account) through which a portion of the grants from the Skills Fund were distributed. The Skills Programme was used to up-skill thousands of mainly low paid workers in the health and local authority sectors across the country.
The Comptroller and Auditor General’s decision to examine matters surrounding the Skills Fund followed correspondence to him from SIPTU on 2nd February last in which General Secretary, Joe O’Flynn, offered to assist Mr Buckley with any information he required from the union in order to resolve outstanding issues.
The letter to the C&AG followed a meeting of the PAC on 15th December, to which SIPTU was not invited, and during which serious, and false, allegations were made against the union concerning funds for which the Health Service Executive (HSE) has been unable to account.
A specific allegation was made by HSE officials concerning two amounts of €190,000 which they claimed were given to ‘SIPTU’ in 2001 and 2002, respectively, by the Office of Health Management of the Department of Health and for which, they claimed, no expenditure details had been provided by the union. SIPTU, in fact, had never received these monies and neither were they received by the ‘Levy Fund’ account which was never operated, nor audited, by the union.
Despite repeated requests by SIPTU to the HSE seeking documentation relating to the payment of these two amounts, no evidence has been produced by the agency by way of return cheques, bank account details etc. to date.
As the result of these false allegations and within days of the December PAC hearing, SIPTU made a complaint to the Garda Fraud Squad which is now investigating the circumstances surrounding the expenditure, or otherwise, of these monies (€380,000) by the Office of Health Management of the Department of Health in 2001 and 2002.
SIPTU also immediately contacted the PAC and asked that the union be invited to attend a hearing of the Committee as soon as possible in order to provide assistance to its members and to correct the misrepresentations and inaccuracies made to them in its absence.
In March last year, a sub-committee of the Trustees of SIPTU published a detailed report based on all the information available to it, including details obtained from the ‘SIPTU Health and Local Authority Levy Fund’ (known as the ‘Levy Fund’) account which was used to administer funds expended during the Skills training programme between 2001 and 2009.
Since the issues surrounding this fund emerged in mid-2010 SIPTU has established that the ‘Levy Fund’ was not a SIPTU account, the grants which went through the account were not received by SIPTU and it was not audited by SIPTU.
A link to the report of the SIPTU Trustees sub-committee is available below.
SIPTU has also written to the chairman of the PAC, John McGuinness (TD), to express concern over comments attributed to him and published last weekend (Sunday 5th February) in the Sunday Independent.
In his reported comments Mr McGuinness accused SIPTU of “playing games”, of trying to “muddy the waters” and of using the PAC as a “battleground to point the finger at the HSE” in relation to the administration of the HSE/Skills fund.
Responding to the remarks in a letter to Mr McGuinness on 8th February last, Joe O’Flynn said that the reported comments “have encouraged a public perception that SIPTU has misappropriated public money and that we have not co-operated with enquiries to date on identifying how public money was accounted for.”
“I suggest that in your capacity as Chairman of this highly respected and important committee, with your consequential responsibility for fair procedure, that you might reflect on the position which you have been reported to have adopted to date and which could reasonably be interpreted by any fair-minded person as being prejudicial, especially when the party to which you were reported to have referred, i.e. SIPTU, has not yet been given an opportunity to assist your Committee on the matter."
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